Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of social networking and more particularly to tracking authored content amongst multiple different social networks.
Description of the Related Art
Collaborative computing refers to the shared responsibility for content elements in a computing system. Originating from notions in project management more than two decades ago, collaborative computing environments now span mere project management and calendaring and scheduling systems to full-fledged activity-centric environments. Recent developments in Internet technologies—namely second generation Web based communities, often referred to as social networks—have injected new life into collaborative computing systems. Exemplary technologies that have broadened the collaborative capabilities of such social networking systems include integration with Wikis, blogs, discussion forums, team rooms, shared bookmarks, syndicate feeds and the like.
Wikis, blogs, forums and team rooms share similar qualities in that all involve a basic post and response paradigm. A post and response paradigm refers to the posting of content by one collaborator and the responsive posting of content by a responsive collaborator and so forth. The progenitor to the post and response paradigm can be found in the basic threaded message board discussions three decades old. Whereas a discussion forum is akin to a message board discussion, a team room is an advanced combination of different collaborative elements including discussion forums to provide collaborative tools for a team of collaborators in order to advance a team goal. A blog is a form of discussion forum where a single individual provides the driving content and other collaborators optionally can post commentary addressing the postings of the single individual. Thus, the blog can be viewed as a publicly viewable diary.
Wikis provide a variation on the discussion forum in that the permitted topics of a wiki are terms to be defined and the definitions are provided by the collaborators in order to converge upon a socially acceptable term definition amongst the collaborators. Finally, shared bookmarks are bookmarks to content shared amongst collaborators and associated with commonly specified tags. The more individuals applying the same tags to associated content, the more popular the content will be viewed and will be visually represented as such in the form of “tag clouds”.
Within a social network, individual users identify other users sharing similar ideas, career paths, job responsibilities or team responsibilities. Whether or not different users actually know each other, as part of the relationship between user postings by a given user can be automatically routed to other interested users, as can responses. Referred to as a subscription or a syndicated feed, interested users can link to many different forums, Wikis, blogs and the like in order to be assured a notification when a user publishes content. Of import, a subscription to the postings of a user always relates to the forum in which the posting is provided, whether that forum be a Wiki, blog, discussion forum, team room or other such similar space.
Still, for many, the interest in the postings of a user in one forum is not limited to the forum alone and it can be desirable to subscribe to the postings of the same user in different forums. To achieve a set of subscriptions for postings of a single user in multiple different forums, correspondingly different subscriptions to correspondingly different forums must be performed. To the extent that one is not aware of the various forums publishing the postings of the single user, one is compelled to search the Internet for content.